Ryan McDougall kirjoitti:
>> Is it possible to view Realxtend through a normal webpage without
>> downloading and installing anything?
>>     
>
> This is not possible for any 3D application, as web browsers do not
> yet come with 3D rendering capabilities. However this is changing, as
>   

That said, people have been able to get that experience: run a hardware 
accelerated 3d scene in / from a web browser 'without installing', for 
several years now using Java. As Flash for the past years (idiotically?) 
missed 3d support, that has left the otherwise quite dead Java applet 
and later Web Start technologies with exactly this niche: enable game 
etc. makers use opengl in 3d things that run for the user without 
installing. *Supposing* the user had Java itself installed, like of 
course the Flash plugin is also required to run (2d) Flash games and 
apps. That has not been self evident with e.g. Vista shipping without 
Flash (and I suppose Java too) preinstalled.

For example the free-to-play RuneScape MMO is a 3d Java applet, just 
tested it now and it is running fine on my old mac that's sitting next 
to this compu here :)

There is a quite nice open source 3d engine, quite similar to Ogre which 
Rex uses, written in Java: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/ . I think it 
would be quite straightforward to write a basic Rex&/Opensim compatible 
viewer using that, in case someone is interested. I've been considering 
JMe as an option for making 3d games for the web that should be easy to 
players to start. Instead of the old embedded-within-browser applet 
technology, Java things nowadays usually use Java Web Start which is 
just a way to launch a normal application from the browser - so when the 
app is running the browser is not in-between, it can do normal full 
screen etc. My son plays a networked football game called power football 
quite often, it's also a jws opengl thing, and running it has worked 
well on several computers.

Microsoft Silverlight and I guess those Windows Presentation Framework 
(WPF) things that are used in the MS tech based browser viewer Xenki are 
a new competitor to both Java and Flash (and Adobe AIR etc) there, 
interesting to see how that will go.

> both Firefox and Chrome will at some point include JavaScript 3D
> rendering APIs:
>   

Yah this will be very interesting, IIRC Adam was already testing to make 
some O3D ClientView to OpenSim.

> install within the browser. I have personally found in-browser 3D
> viewers to be no more simple to install than a separate program.
> It'd be nice for realXtend to do this, but I don't think it's
> currently a very high priority. That said, it is open source, so there
>   

Yah. Some apps work so that they are both a standalone app *and* a 
browser plugin at the same time, I mean the same installer installs them 
so that they can run as both. Quicktime on Windows and Adobe PDF reading 
etc. come to mind as examples.

~Toni


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